NADA to elevate women in retail

A new National Automobile Dealers Association program aims to shine a spotlight on the opportunities for women in automotive retailing.

The Women Driving Auto Retail initiative is focused on amplifying the voices of women already working in auto retail and increasing employment of women in dealerships.

The initiative, in the works for years and with funding finally in place for 2020, was rolled out at the NADA Show last month with speakers, panels and a video contest.

For Ohio dealer and NADA Director Michelle Primm, the initiative's launch is a culmination of a goal she and other female leaders in NADA have had for more than a decade.

"We needed our own umbrella, we needed our own budget and we needed leadership on the topic in-house," Primm, managing partner of Cascade Auto Group in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, told Automotive News.

NADA declined to share the amount of money it's pledged to the initiative for this year. Primm said the achievement is not about a specific dollar figure; it's about being recognized and securing a commitment that the program and its funding will continue in future years.

"We now have a place," she said.

That sentiment dovetailed with a key point echoed in various speeches and panel discussions held throughout the NADA convention weekend: Women have gained ground and have an important place in the industry as consumers, manufacturers and retailers. But biases can still be problematic, so it's important that industry stakeholders work hard to overcome them.

The dealership landscape is an area ripe for gains, particularly on the employment side. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, women held 19 percent of jobs at U.S. dealerships, according to the NADA Dealership Workforce Study.

That number hasn't shifted in years, and the percentage of women occupying customer-facing and management jobs is much lower than that 19 percent. The overall number is helped because most dealership back-office positions are occupied by women.

Dealers can play a role in improving those statistics by making a dedicated effort to hire and retain women.

NADA, as part of the Women Driving Auto Retail initiative, intends to provide retailers with tools and expertise designed to help increase the numbers of women employees at dealerships. Hiring more women and making sure a dealership's customer-service approach feels welcoming to women are important, experts said.

It's "intimidating for some women to come into a dealership," said Mindy McAlindon, a marketing executive representing the Association of National Advertisers who spoke at the Women Driving Auto Retail brunch during the NADA Show. That presents a big opportunity given that 85 percent of purchases are made by or influenced by women, she said.

Dealers should work hard to make "sure that your dealership is friendly toward women, that you recognize when a woman walks in your dealership that she's quite capable of this decision — and she may be the only decision-maker in that family," she said.

McAlindon also talked about how pervasive unconscious bias is in society.

That's something even dealers experience. Liza Myers Borches, CEO of Carter Myers Automotive, once was mistaken for a spouse of a dealer, not a dealer herself, when she went to a baseball game with an automaker.

A situation such as that is rare these days, Borches said at a Cox Automotive panel of auto retail leaders held during the NADA Show. But "that just told me that there's still some unconscious bias. It happens, and we're all going to move past it. We're going to learn from it together."

Matt Laughridge, a dealer who spoke on a panel at the Women Driving Auto Retail brunch, said women are half of the employees at his family's Terry Reid Auto Group in Cartersville, Ga. The impetus for that came from personal experience as he watched his mother and father operate the business together.

"One thing that I hated the most was watching how my mom was treated," Laughridge said. "My mom and my dad created the dealership together, and she was kind of the glue behind my dad's hammer and forcefulness. ... People, they would come by and say, 'Oh, your dad did so well last month.' They always left my mom out. To me, that was kind of a catalyst for me to try to change."

Sherry Schultz, chief human resource officer for Walser Automotive Group in Minneapolis, said it's important to put policies in place that are inviting to all potential employees, men and women. She cited parental leave, a program adopted by Walser and used most frequently by the men who work there.

"This benefit spoke to all," Schultz said at the brunch. The leave policy cost Walser $200,000 last year.

But "is our turnover down? Yes. Is our hiring up? Yes," Schultz said. "For men and women both. But you have to put money in."

Another member of that panel — Evelyn Chatel, general manager at Bean Auto Group in Miami — said dealers have an opportunity to educate their communities about women's potential in the industry. She recalled attending a career-day event at a school and walking into a room of 30 boys who struggled to connect with her.

"You could see they were like, 'She must be in the wrong room. Where's the technician guy that's supposed to come in here?' " Chatel recalled. "And so I really teamed up with the teachers and the facilitators at schools and gave them insight on how many opportunities we have at the dealership for women."

Those opportunities go beyond technician jobs to accounting staff, sales reps and managers, service advisers, body shop adjusters, she said.

"It takes getting down to the community level and bringing their awareness up to understand that we have this amazing business, that we can include everyone," Chatel said.

During the past few years, more women have been recruited and promoted in the auto industry, speakers on the Cox Automotive panel said. But women should continue to voice their opinions to keep propelling the industry toward change, they added.

Most millennials see a more balanced work force than previous generations, said Lori Wittman, senior vice president of dealer software solutions for Cox Automotive.

"There's not these boxes around this is what women do and this is what men do," she said.

Encouraging women to consider technician jobs will be a part of the Women Driving Auto Retail initiative, Primm said. That effort matches well with the NADA Foundation's drive to solve the technician gap and recruit more young people to service jobs at dealerships, she said.

A few years ago, the vast majority of conversations about recruiting women in the industry were started by women. Today, many men are intentionally recruiting and promoting more women, Borches said.

"It's not just women talking about this subject anymore. It's all of us," she said.

But if women don't speak up, Borches added, the industry would never change. "We owe it to each other to speak up and be confident," she said. "We need everybody's opinion."